Satisfaction
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(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction is a song by the Rolling Stones, released in 1965. It was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Keith Richards claims to have written the music for Satisfaction in his sleep. He recorded a rough version of the riff on a Philips cassette player which he discovered when he woke up. He had no idea he had written it. The famous guitar riff — which Richards intended to replace with a horn section, but never got round to it — drives the song. Mick Jagger, by Richards’ account, wrote the lyrics by of a hotel pool in Clearwater, Florida.
Why is this rock staple showing up in the pages of the Jolly Contrarian? To illustrate the principle of rent-seeking, readers, in this case delivered by the medium of intellectual property law. For notwithstanding the paucity of effort — Richards apparently not even conscious; Mick Jagger failing to appreciate the irony of his situation for the quarter of an hour it took him to pen the lyrics, the song not only shot the Rolling Stones to stardom, but has continued to accrue them a king’s ransom from royalties. Information is hard to come by, but I don’t think I'm many orders of magnitude out when I estimate that Satisfaction has earned Jagger and Richards tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars over 50 years.
Not bad for fifteen minutes’ work.